1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for product-line architecture description and verification, and more particularly, to an apparatus and a method for generating product-line architecture model describing commonality and variability, and verifying the generated product-line architecture model to satisfy requirements based on a scenario.
2. Description of the Related Art
A software product-line is defined as a set of software products or a set of software systems having similar functions. A product-line architecture is a representative software architecture for all products included in a software product-line. When a product is developed, a product architecture is instantiated from the product-line architecture based on product requirements. Components are assembled or newly developed according to the defined product architecture. The product-line has been spotlighted as a technology for rapidly manufacturing a newly developed product.
The most important asset of the product-line technology is the product-line architecture. A product architecture is defined according to the product-line architecture. For conveniently producing the product architecture from the product-line architecture, commonality and variability among various products in a product-line must be accurately described. Accordingly, there are many studies in progress for developing a method accurately describing the commonality and the variability of products in the product-line. However, there have been difficulties of the existing methods to describe the variability of products or to understand described variability of products. Therefore, the existing methods have not been widely used.
Accordingly, it has demanded a method for managing dependency relationship between complicated variant elements.
Moreover, it has required a method for verifying a designed architecture model to satisfy requirements of developed software before embodying the designed architecture model.